edg at wam.umd.edu (Ezra Greenberg) wrote:
>I upgraded a while back to MMA for OS2 and have not been able to get the
>windows front end to work in a satisfactory manner. On my machine, the TCP
>link is oh so very slow. The PM front end, is, well, useless as far as I can
>tell. I have many complicated notebooks, and I have yet to figure out a way
>to work with the various parts in a reasonable way.
>Are there any other options? Is anybody else out there having problems with
>Mathlink to the windows front end?
For some reason, and I'll probably complain to Wolfram about that, the
windows front-end keeps polling the keyboard like mad. The result of
this is that, when the mathlink communication is established, the
front-end sends data to the os/2 kernel which only gets a fraction of
the cpu time to do its work. That's the reason why it is so slow.
Now, for the solution (or at least interim fix), you must first get a
utility that boost the priority of your os/2 programs like "nice" (try
hobbes.nmsu.edu in dir /os2/unix, filename nice10.zip). Once you have
it, go in your wnmath22 directory. There should be a file called
math.cmd. In this file you will find the line (with a different drive
possibly),
start /PGM "h:\math\mathpm.exe " %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9
replace it with
start h:\apps\bin\nice.exe /c h:\math\mathpm.exe %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7
%8 %9
Replacing the paths as appropriate. Beware though that the
mathematica kernel will run at time-critical priority! This means
that if your calculation is going to take a long time, your system
might be unusable. The best thing to do would be to start MMA in
normal priority, with delta 32 (the front-end runs in normal priority,
delta 1). That would probably give it enough CPU time over the
front-end to complete calculations in a reasonable amount of time, yet
the desktop could remain responsive. I seem to remember that there is
another "nice" program that can adjust the deltas. You should
probably look on hobbes.
In my case I never need the windows front-end so I'm just using a
plain text like interface. If I need a scroll-back buffer I can
always use emacs, or use ckermit and telnet into my own machine in
loopback mode. The best solution would be a native front-end, or at
least a better windows version. I have to send an email to Wolfram...
>Ezra D. Greenberg
>Department of Economics
>University of Maryland
>edg at wam.umd.edu
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